Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Thomas Yamil Reller | Email: treller@itba.edu.ar
Thomas Yamil Reller1°2°, Natalia El Hage Barrita1°2°, Zoe Rapoport2°, Diego Moncada1°2°
1° 1: Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires
2° Laboratorio de Neurofisiología de la Memoria, Instituto de Biologíca Celular y Neurociencias (CONICET-UBA/FMED))
Memory, or the collection of memories of any individual, is shaped over a lifetime in various learning experiences and creative processes that also rely on previously stored information. Yet, the environment’s dynamics and shifts in individual circumstances can lead to discrepancies in many factors between the formation of a memory and its later use. Therefore, memory prediction capabilities may turn inaccurate or incomplete, triggering mechanisms to update or refine the trace. This may happen multiple times, particularly for repeatedly accessed memories, suggesting the need for a biological system to organize and integrate these updates. Here we begin to study this possibility.
To do it, we followed an object location memory, in rats, through multiple reconsolidation sessions. To the moment, our results show that each session triggers the long-term storage of information about a novel object’s position, in a time-lapse that otherwise would not occur. Impairing a reconsolidation session also impairs the updating of the memory trace. Impairing the first session induces anterograde and retrograde amnesia. Interestingly, impairing reconsolidation in another session also induces amnesia, but it retroacts up to information acquired in a previous reconsolidation session, without affecting the memory formed upon learning.
This first approximation suggests that information added to a trace in successive reconsolidation sessions is stacked in layers with partial memory representations